The rules of the criminal justice system are fair

Pros

Cons

These rules have been evolving since the days of Medieval English common law. They have been tweaked for centuries. The people who choose to go into this field have a bias towards seeing justice done. While not perfect the system is certainly fair.

Around 97% of defendants take a plea bargain, which shows that the system is almost exclusively catching and prosecuting guilty people. If a innocent person told their defence council that they were innocent of the crime the council would absolutely recommend a trial, as in trial, the defendant is innocent until proven guilty beyond reasonable doubt.

Rules are applicable to everyone in the same fashion.

"Fair as possible" (a moving target) is "fair enough" out of necessity. As fuzzy concepts maintained by humans, fairness and justice are unattainable ideals. Life is not fair. The fairness of something like the justice system is relative to inaction, predictably allowing greater unfairnesses (i.e. crime). Assuming people continue working to improve the system, the judgment of that system (especially in a democracy) is the best option yet. It's fair that the system isn't perfectly fair.

Prosecutors have many advantages over the defence.

Police officers are extremely rarely held accountable by the criminal justice system because the rules require that an officer be investigated by his/her coworkers and charged by lawyers whose professional success depends on working cooperatively with police officers.

The sentences required by the criminal justice system are arbitrary and divorced from the context of the facts of the case.

Lawyers are expensive, good lawyers are more expensive, and public defenders are notoriously underpaid and overworked. Money very often determines the outcome of a trial.

There is a major flaw in the criminal justice system, in that there's a possibility that the verdict will be affected, either by the jury's bias or misinterpretation of the evidence presented on trial.

The warrant process is just a rubber stamp for whatever the police want. They work with each other every day, in the private sector this would be a case of regulatory capture.

The US Justice System, according to a lot of those who have been through it (talk to any ex-prisoner and they will say the same thing), is, sadly, corrupted. If we want to improve our laws, we should look to countries with higher legal integrity than ours & quickly remold our justice system in that better image. For example, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Japan, the UK, & Canada are all thought of as having a better legal system than the US. Our legal system, regrettably, has become corrupted.